'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly involved), my take is that no one should ever do business with Oracle if they can possibly avoid it.

&quot;a specialist advisory company helping clients deal with Oracle licenses&quot;<p>I would (naively, I know) imagine that if you need to hire a third party to help you sort out your licenses with a vendor, you would do whatever it takes to get rid of that vendor. It&#x27;s almost as if Oracle <i>wants</i> their customers to ditch them the first chance they get.

Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased):<p>&quot;We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly.&quot;

At my job, we have been merrily replacing Oracle products by open-source ones. You know, the common thing any employee feels morally obligated to do as soon as they realize there is an Oracle product in the stack. But the interesting bit is how those products got there: in some companies, you call it &quot;modern stack&quot; if the tech is less than fifteen years old. Sometimes they will replace a part of it and instead of jumping all the way to the present, they go like &quot;Well, it&#x27;s 2024 now. So, we need to migrate our stack from 2009 to 2010 this year. What version of Jboss came out in 2010? We need to update to that one. PostgreSQL? No, PostgreSQL 8 doesn&#x27;t support deferrable unique constraints, which we need. We need to keep paying for OracleDB until June.&quot;

Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi&#x2F;perl projects, but they&#x27;d started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... &quot;oh wow, you have 150 servers that each should be licensed at $8k&#x2F;server... let&#x27;s talk!&quot;. The very next day the CEO came to a big dev meeting and started ranting that we needed to optimize the hell out of the sites to get the server count down ASAP. And... we also became an &#x27;official&#x27; MS partner, which seemed to put the kibosh (officially or otherwise) on more expansive work in to Java. We were doing a bit of Java, but I think we&#x27;d have expanded more in that direction without the MS pressure. Yes, they fed us more work... but it meant... we were doing more hands on work (fixing loads of bugs in their commerce server) while they just collected license revenue. Great business if you can get it, I guess...<p>FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It&#x27;s also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.

Why would anyone have chosen Oracle in the last... 10 years (let alone even further back)? It&#x27;s expensive, and many things I read from customers hints at deep regret.

Oracle&#x27;s favourite phrase seems to be &quot;You&#x27;re out of compliance&quot;, and their only solution is for you to pay more.

&gt; Earlier last year, it made changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model, basing it on a per-employee metric many said would increase costs for users.<p>Would running Java under Corretto 21 change this?

Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re going through an Oracle audit.<p>Short of imagining some long ongoing legal action, is there really any incentive for Oracle to be truthful about anything?<p>It seems like this entire auditing system is just a wildcard as far as time &#x2F; money sunk into the auditing process and Oracle can deploy it at will...

The &quot;new contract&quot; vs old sounds like internal problems where I work.<p>We&#x27;ll have a contract signed and everything is OK for a couple years. Then someone goes ham on inventing an approval matrix and other policy&#x2F;rules to keep the offshored workers from making mistakes, and we have problems. Vendors getting paid late because of policy.<p>Even if we provide the contract we&#x27;ll get arguments that it can&#x27;t be so because it says something different in their database. It&#x27;s that way in their DB, because if unknown, they default to whatever is best for our company.

How frequent are these Oracle audits?<p>My first thought was that you&#x27;d want to have ongoing diligence to be compliant. (Just like you don&#x27;t want to have a delinquent debt with a loan shark who relishes penalties.)<p>But my second thought was that, if the audits are infrequent, some companies might intentionally violate the licenses. Or not want to know nor have a paper trail if there are inadvertent violations. (Both companies and individuals tend to like to kick problems down the road. Due to short-term thinking by businesses, and individuals who might be gone before chickens come home to roost.)

I worked at a phone company circa 2010 that basically had an office of Oracle compliance. They had lots of ongoing disputed. I sat in a cubicle across from the guy who worked to get projects off Weblogic Server after Oracle acquired BEA. The doctrine was that WLS cost more and used 4X the CPU and memory that alternatives did, in addition to avoiding Oracle audits.

Any time I read anything about oracle I wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever chose to do business with them

Having gone through an IRS audit (spoiler alert: I do not recommend.), I can&#x27;t imagine anyone willingly signing any sort of contract with a private company that allows them to treat you the same way.

As the old saying goes: oracle has no customers, only hostages.

I know, I know, but hear me (far) out.. didn&#x27;t Snowflake start out from ex Oracle people?

Imagine a business in which you can treat your customers so badly that you can and do pull an audit on them.

&gt; &quot;We decided that we had a minimal amount [of Java]. We came up with a non-Oracle based architecture for development and we implemented a policy that pointed towards the other development platform and we evaluated methods to discourage or prevent the download of Java software,&quot;

Look, if you are already in business with Oracle then you have my condolences. But if you aren&#x27;t in business with them then there is absolutely no world where you should ever under any circumstances consider getting into business with them.<p>Nothing their database does can&#x27;t be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do not do business with Oracle under any circumstances.<p>If you are already an Oracle customer and you have the opportunity to drop them from your stack. Do not hesitate, Do not pause, Immediately take that opportunity. There is no downside only upside in not doing business with Oracle.

&gt; <i>A user of Oracle since the 1980s,</i><p>We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences.<p>But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment&#x2F;lock-in that would be hard&#x2F;prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel&#x27;s familiarity with the legacy setup gives job security. So there are multiple reasons to pay the Oracle Tax (and&#x2F;or Microsoft Tax) and not disrupt the status quo.